You're Not Alone: a founder on grief, control, and leading through trauma
Anthony Kennada talks about losing a child, his own heart condition, and the illusion of control while leading a company through a crisis.
The last four years have been the hardest of Anthony Kennada's life. It started with his own health scare, a heart arrhythmia called atrial fibrillation. Then, his five year old daughter suffered three seizures. Last November, he and his wife lost their second daughter just two weeks before she was due to be born. His wife almost died in the process.
All this happened while he was founding his company, Audience Plus. The same week he lost his daughter, he also parted ways with his cofounder, announced a full product rewrite, and had his new engineering lead quit. He told me he could not put on a game face. On a Monday morning Zoom call with his team, he just lost it and started crying.
His biggest learning is the beauty in surrender. As a founder in a revenue role, your focus is on controlling everything you can. But these moments showed him we really do not control anything. For him, coping has been about his faith tradition and a community that stepped up to support his family, making him feel like he was not alone.
“Maybe that's one of the first steps to surrender is saying, I can't do this on my own, I need help.”
Notes
- In his early thirties, he developed atrial fibrillation, a heart arrhythmia uncommon for his age.
- He and his wife lost their second daughter two weeks before she was supposed to be born, and his wife's life was also at risk.
- The same week his daughter died, he parted ways with his cofounder and his new engineering lead quit without notice.
- Coping involved his faith tradition and a community of friends who brought food and started text chains to support his family.